I'm personally not a big fan of mocking; it introduces a lot of duplication into the system. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of testing a fully integrated system unless you've TDD'd everything from scratch, because then people let systems get slow enough to make tests too slow to maintain a good pace.
If you're already in the "integrating with slow things" problem space, then one solution is to automatically generate the mocks from real responses. E.g., some testing setup code calls your Django layer to create and fetch a User object. You then persist that so that your tests run quickly.
And yeah, I'll definitely use end-to-end smoke tests to make sure that the whole thing joins up in the obvious spots. But those approaches are slow and flaky enough that I've never managed to do more than basic testing through them.
If you're already in the "integrating with slow things" problem space, then one solution is to automatically generate the mocks from real responses. E.g., some testing setup code calls your Django layer to create and fetch a User object. You then persist that so that your tests run quickly.
And yeah, I'll definitely use end-to-end smoke tests to make sure that the whole thing joins up in the obvious spots. But those approaches are slow and flaky enough that I've never managed to do more than basic testing through them.